Update 6: Act II, in which the game starts getting dickish
Welcome to Act 2. Act 2 is the shortest playable act in the game, and is where the game designers looked at Dark Seed and said “Hey, hold my drink.” There’s a LOT of conversation in this act, most of it totally unimportant to the overall plot. I’m going to be skipping/summarizing most of it.
This is the Leyendecker Museum, where we’ll be spending the rest of the game. There are maps of it included in the manual, which I’ll post as bonus content at the bottom of this post. There’s no real transition from Bob’s taxi, we’re just sort of teleported here.
The front door is guarded by a man we’ve heard of from Lo Fat, but haven’t met yet - Wolf Heimlich. Wolf is basically the game’s means of gating off certain areas to ensure sequence progression. If we try asking him a question…
This is pretty much his response if we try interacting with him at all once we’re in the museum. Wolf basically disappears after Act 2, so we never get the chance to ask him anything. The only thing we can do is give him our press pass, which he will hold on to (as there is no other use for it).
Inside the museum’s foyer, we can see a couple of characters that you might recognize in the group in the center of the screen - those being Ziggy and Dr. Carrington. There are a total of 14 conversations Laura has to eavesdrop on to progress the plot, which are triggered by going near groups of story characters. Most of these aren’t particularly interesting. We’d better grab ourselves a drink first.
From here on out, most items are missable. While we do have a few chances to come back to the foyer, we’re going to need to grab an empty water glass here for eavesdropping purposes early in Act 3.
Unfortunately, the shortest route to where we actually need to go is blocked by the group of people talking, so we’ll have to listen to their conversation on the way there.
From left: Ziggy, Dr. Carter, Yvette, Rameses Najeer, and Dr. Carrington. This conversation is mostly Dr. Carter going through how he found the Dagger of Amon Ra in a buried temple in Egypt in an attempt to impress Yvette. Most of this stuff is in the manual. The one interesting point, however..
: “Blah blah blah, temple blah blah and then I found the dagger..” : “And dat’s when youse heisted it, right?”
Some background: this conversation (along with some others a bit later on in Act 2) suggests that worship of the ancient Egyptian gods is still mainstream in the game’s version of Egypt. In reality, worship of the gods of ancient Egypt had mostly died out over a hundred years ago. This actually becomes a pretty major plot point. The person speaking with the lisp, by the way, is Rameses Najeer.
Due to the game’s pathfinding, we get dropped just to the left of the gaggle, which causes us to hit the second conversation almost immediately as Laura is still trying to get to her location (it’s the right side of the foyer) and runs right into them again.
Conversation 2 is Ziggy, Dr. Carter, Najeer and Dr. Carrington talking about their.. sexual experiences.. with Yvette. Nothing we’re particularly interested in.
Anyway, now that we’ve established (for the what, sixth time?) that Yvette is basically a French version of Anarchy Panty, we can go where I was trying to go all along - the right side of the foyer. There’s actually an important clue there.
Surprisingly, it’s in the gift shop, which is where we’ll head straight away as there are no conversations to catch on this side of the museum at this point.
If you’ll look toward the back, you’ll notice there’s a rack of what look like knives. This is the first real dick move the game pulls. You see, in investigating the theft of the dagger, there are certain pieces of evidence we need to have seen - even if you do absolutely everything else right, missing a single piece of evidence can completely screw you over. This is one of them.. I think. I haven’t ever bothered to do a screw-up run, but I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be the point where if you missed the magnifying glass, the game goes “HEY DUMBASS YOU MISSED SOMETHING”.
Anyway, this particular dick move is a pixel hunt of sorts. If we use the magnifying glass on the rack of knives, we find that they’re replicas of the Dagger of Amon Ra. Most of them look like this:
It’s a little hard to make out, but you can see the words “Made in Pittsburgh” on the blade. There’s one dagger in the rack - on the left side - that is a little different. It’s a pain in the ass to find unless you know it’s there, and even once you do it’s STILL kind of a pain in the ass because the leftmost two daggers actually don’t register as clicking on the dagger case.
Wait a second.. that one doesn’t have the stamp on it! Holy shit, we just found the actual Dagger and solved the mystery! Come on, Laura, we’ve got to tell Detective O’Riley right away.. or not. For some reason, this particular scene is never brought up again. I don’t know why, or how it makes sense that Laura wouldn’t tell anyone about what she saw. Even if you assumed it was a factory defect or something, it still wouldn’t hurt to say something.
Oh, right. You might be asking how a company in Pittsburgh is already making replica daggers when the Andrea Doria landed in New York not even a week ago and the exhibit hasn’t actually opened yet. The answer to that is that Dr. Carter’s cousin is the guy who discovered the tomb of King Tut in the game’s universe, and Tut’s tomb had its own Dagger in it. For some reason, this Dagger wasn’t the real one and I don’t know how that makes sense but that’s what the manual says so I’m gonna roll with that.
Once we pull back from looking at the real dagger (and trying to take it only to find that the display case is locked), a tone sounds and the time changes. This is the first of two time shifts in Act 2, both of which are scripted. Once we get past Act 2, the time shifts will come more frequently and are no longer scripted (for the most part) so it is possible to lose the game by running out of time. Shortly afterward, we can hear some jackboots marching down the hall..
: “Oh, I’m sorry. The door was unlocked.”
Yeah, on second thought, maybe mentioning the dagger being in here is a bad idea. I can see Wolf being one of those Sierra-brand asshole characters who would kill you to stop the word getting out. We get unceremoniously booted back to the museum’s foyer, where..
A wild Steve appears! Laura and Steve are about to have a big, overly-long conversation to set them up as love interests, so I’m going to be skipping a lot of that (I took a screenshot with each new line of dialogue and it’s bigger than the last two updates combined). The gist of it is that Laura comments on Steve being there, Steve mentions he came to see her, and then she asks why he’s wearing work boots with a tuxedo.
Steve invites Laura outside. The first time I played this, I thought I had screwed up and this was going to be a death scene. The scene changes over to Steve and what looks like an eighty year old Spanish grandmother having a romantic moment.
Oh man, this is the point where he says he’s really King Graham and we’re going to Daventry, right? LP over, let’s go switch over to King’s Quest. There’s no way they’re going to do the bad romance novel thing they did in King’s Quest 7… right?
God damn you, Roberta Williams!! (On a side note, I’m almost certain both Steve and this entire scene were entirely hers.)
“The contents of this scene were almost physically painful for you to read.” - Yu Narukami, Persona 4
Oh god, I can’t take any more of this shit. Quick, what else can I LP? Steam, give me some ideas!
Oh no.. no no no no no…
Okay, fine, I’ll do it! Anything but more of..
Oh, good. We’re back in the museum and Steve is going back to his home planet. Next update, we’ll eavesdrop on a bunch of people and finish Act 2.. and hopefully never see any more of Roberta’s godawful writing.
Bonus Content:
Map of the Leyendecker showing the rooms we can currently visit. I’ll add more when we get there.
Leyendecker Foyer concept art.